Hard drives

A friend recently purchased two shoe-boxes full of hard drives, both laptop drives and desktop drives that were pulled from old PCs at the local college. They have these 'junk' sales once a month where they unload old PCs and classroom/office furniture and related stuff. Anyway, there's a total of maybe 30 laptop drives ranging in size from 8gb to 120gb. So far, only 3 have tested DOA, but there's 3 or 4 that have been passworded. From what I understand these HD passwords are in the HDs BIOS. Is there any way to reset or clear the passwords? He really doesn't want to throw away a couple of 30gb and 40gb laptop drives that work perfect.... any ideas?
Thanks.

 

These links may be worth looking at. http://tivo.upgrade-instructions.com/files.html.
http://www.hddunlock.com/.

 

Thanks, that 2nd link was looking promising until.... I realized they charge a fee depending on drive size.... and I read the last question and answer in their FAQ's:

All of the passworded hard drives are Hitachi drives
Thanks again though... I will try some of the downloads from the first link on some other drives sometime just to find out what they're all about....

If anyone else can help, please post a link or a tip, or whatever!
Thanks!
:major